Rep. Joaquín Castro: If Trump Weren’t President, ‘He’d Be In Court Right Now’

With the release of court filings Friday that seemed to further implicate President Donald Trump in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, one congressman says Trump is lucky he’s in the White House.

“The only thing keeping Donald Trump from being indicted and being charged with a crime, beyond wealth and privilege, is that he occupies the office of the presidency,” Rep. Joaquín Castro (D-Texas) told host Ali Velshi on MSNBC Friday night.

Castro, a member of the House intelligence committee, which has been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, was discussing prosecutors’ raft of court filings Friday in the criminal cases against former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Among other things, those documents indicated that prosecutors believe Trump ordered Cohen to pay hush money to two women he’d had affairs with to protect his presidential run.

But even if Trump’s job is saving him from having to appear in court, Castro said, Congress must be open to impeachment.

“Are you in a position to consider discussing impeachment in Congress?” asked Velshi.

“We have to be,” Castro replied. “When the evidence becomes so clear that you very likely have a criminal sitting in the Oval Office, what is the Congress left to do at that point?”

On Saturday morning, Trump responded to the release of the documents on Twitter (in nearly all caps, of course), saying, “AFTER TWO YEARS AND MILLIONS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS (and a cost of over $30,000,000), NO COLLUSION!”

AFTER TWO YEARS AND MILLIONS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS (and a cost of over $30,000,000), NO COLLUSION!

The documents released by Mueller’s team Friday indicate prosecutors are in fact continuing to look into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, including a real estate project in Moscow that Cohen was allegedly discussing with Trump “well into” the 2016 race.